Dr. Sundar ThangapandianEngineering Research and Development Center (ERDC), US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA, Email: sundar81@illinois.edu
Biography
Sundar Thangapandian is a computational chemist/biophysicist at Environmental Laboratory of U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Sundar has more than 6 years of experience in the area of computational chemistry/biophysics including two years of pharmaceutical industrial experience working in close relationship with medicinal chemists focusing on designing novel therapeutics. He is basically a pharmacist and earned his Ph.D. in Computational Biophysics. Before joining ERDC, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group (TCBG), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), IL. His recent research involves applying state-of-the-art computational methodologies investigating the functional mechanisms of biomedically important membrane transporters and their transport cycles. His experience also include using machine learning approaches in designing small molecules as potential therapeutics for various treatments. He authored 51 peer-reviewed publications (H-index: 15) including reviews and book chapters in highly reputed journals including Nature, PNAS.
Research Interest
My research interests include computational studies of (i) large-scale conformational changes in complex biological events (ii) designing specific drugs to reduce adverse effects (iii) small molecule transport including membrane partitioning (iv) host-pathogen interactions